The third decade of the 20th century was a turbulent, yeasty period in American culture. With soldiers back from the First World War, the economy buzzed with new demands for homes, clothes, cars, radios and movies. Cities exploded with new energies, including jazz, art-deco zigzags and the Harlem Renaissance; for the first time urban dwellers outnumbered rural. Road construction boomed.

Newly entitled to vote, women poured into the workplace. “Flappers” shocked elders with short skirts, bobbed coifs, smoking and drinking. Prohibition paradoxically sparked an explosion of illicit speak-easies. Young men and women flaunted sexuality, even homosexuality.

This was high-octane fuel for art, and an exhibition opening Sunday at the Dallas Museum of Art explores a wide range of artistic responses. Organized by the Brooklyn Museum of Art and its American-art curator, Teresa A. Carbone, more than 130 paintings, photographs and sculptures have been handsomely arranged in the Barrel Vault and Quadrant Galleries by the DMA’s Sue Canterbury.

Actually, “Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties” describes only part of what’s going on here. Yes, we see new visions of youth: from heavy classical figures and densely muscled workers to newly slender women in newly brief swimsuits; newly “butch” women and “pretty” men.

Other works, both paintings and photographs, alternately admire geometries of new factories and worry at the dehumanizing impact of higher-density cities. Loneliness in the midst of plenty is a recurrent motif.

A decade earlier, artists as different as Picasso and Kandinsky, Arthur Dove and Georgia O’Keeffe had pushed painting well into abstraction, but American art of the ’20s was preoccupied with people, places and things.

Accompanying new calls for healthy living, the human body is a major theme. It could be as ruggedly muscular, and roughly painted, as Thomas Hart Benton’s laborers or as sleekly streamlined as Paul Manship’s bronze Spear Thrower.

Pouty was the new sexy, as was androgyny. Even the calla lily, its phallic spadix swathed in feminine curves, could be a coded allusion to gender ambiguity.

At the other aesthetic end of the DMA show, both paintings and photographs find novel beauties in urban and industrial scenes. Walker Evans captures the elaborate choreography of beams and braces supporting huge electric-lighted signs. Through crisscrossing facetings, Charles Demuth sees a big grain elevator as a modern counterpart to an Egyptian temple. John Marin turns lower Manhattan into a jazzy, jagged jumble.

The most haunting image of all may be a lone woman, only her backside partially glimpsed through a window, in a sparsely furnished brownstone apartment. Edward Hopper’s Night Window is all about dislocation and loneliness, voyeurism and sexual vulnerability, powerful themes for the newly urbanized.

The “Youth and Beauty” title suggests a show far more tightly focused than this one, which ventures off onto all sorts of tangents. That’s OK. It confronts us with important transitions in American civilization, the births of new ways of seeing and new mythologies. As current political disputes prove, the dichotomies of human vs. machine, urban vs. rural, male vs. female, liberation vs. control remain very much with us.

Plan your life

Through May 27 at the Dallas Museum of Art, 1717 N. Harwood, Dallas. Hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays through Sundays; 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursdays; 11 a.m. to midnight third Friday of each month. Special price: $14, includes rest of museum. 214-922-1200. dallasmuseumofart.org.

To post a comment, log into your chosen social network and then add your comment below. Your comments are subject to our Terms of Service and the privacy policy and terms of service of your social network. If you do not want to comment with a social network, please consider writing a letter to the editor.

About Scott Cantrell

Also writing occasionally about art and architecture, Scott came to The News in 1999, after 10 years at the Kansas City Star and previous positions at newspapers in Albany and Rochester, N.Y. A former president of the Music Critics Association of North America and two-time winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor award for music journalism, he has also written for The New York Times, Encyclopaedia Britannica, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and magazines including Gramophone, BBC Music, Opera, Opera News and Symphony Magazine. He has performed as an organist and choral conductor and taught music history at the State University of New York at Albany. He enjoys eating all too much, his tastes ranging from barbecue, collard greens and fried okra to French cuisine and fiery Indian food.